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UnFOILable: How RIOC and the State Keep Residents in the Dark

Transparency in Name Only

Theo Gobblevelt

Sep 26

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FOIL exists for one reason: because government is the public’s business. This piece follows earlier reporting on the Public Purpose Fund cycle, including Bigger Pie, Uneven Slices and Eleanor Rivers’ narratives from the September 19 board meeting. Together, they map a troubling pattern. Residents of Roosevelt Island deserve to know how their money is spent—especially when it comes to the Public Purpose Fund. But when residents ask to see the records, they don’t get answers. They get walls.

On May 28, 2025, I wrote to RIOC’s board, legal department, and the New York Community Trust with a series of questions ahead of an analysis of the $250,000 Public Purpose Fund awards. I asked: what other support RIVAA receives, what contracts exist between RIOC and RIVAA, and whether existing support was weighed in deliberations. The questions were specific and fair, with a deadline of June 1 for inclusion in our reporting.

The Response

The responses were telling. Deputy General Counsel of RIOC Lada Stasko brushed me off: “Should you request any RIOC’s records under FOIL, please submit your future FOIL requests as described on RIOC’s website.” In other words, don’t ask questions—file FOILs.

Vice President & Chief Financial Officer, Dhruvika Amin of RIOC, offered a different tack: “RIOC engages with New York Community Trust to ensure these public funds are allocated fairly among the island’s eligible 501c3s. They do their due diligence in accordance with strict internal protocols and have a very strong reputation. It’s important for us to ensure the integrity of this process, which is why utilizing a partner like NYCT is so important.”

The FOIL:

Before we can dive deeper, we need to explain what a FOIL is and what it stands for. The Freedom of Information Law sounds dry, I know—it’s Albany jargon that could put a room to sleep faster than a RIOC board meeting. So I asked Eleanor for some help to color between the lines.

Here’s what she sent me:

“FOIL is like the magic key to the cookie jar. The government keeps all the cookies—meeting notes, emails, memos—and FOIL is the law that says, ‘Share, they’re not all yours.’
Now, imagine you’re five years old, and your big brother says, ‘Trust me, I ate only one cookie.’ But you see crumbs on his shirt, chocolate on his chin, and—oh!—a missing sleeve because he tried to hide the evidence. FOIL is you saying, ‘Hand me the jar, mister. I’m counting.’
Why’s it important? Because otherwise, the big kids run off with all the cookies and leave us with celery sticks. And nobody ever FOIL’d for celery.”

The point Eleanor makes is simple: FOIL is about accountability. It’s the law that stops those in power from keeping the jar hidden or handing us only crumbs. Before we look at what happened with our own request, remember this: when public agencies choose secrecy over sunlight, the whole community is left guessing who got the cookies and why.

And in our case, we already knew who got the cookies, who got the crumbs, and who was left with celery sticks. What we didn’t know—what we set out to uncover—was why.

So we did as instructed. On June 9, 2025, I filed a formal Freedom of Information Law request for communications between RIOC and NYCT regarding the 2025 Public Purpose Fund—eligibility discussions, vetting, selection, and anything involving RIRA’s application—an organization that became a central point as we unraveled further details.

The point was simple. We know the awards. We need to know the process.

The Delays
What followed was a pattern all Roosevelt Islanders know too well:

First, a 20-day clock.
Then an extension: RIOC was moving offices.
Then another: backlog.

Each time, the message was the same: wait longer.

The First Response
When records finally arrived, they were almost all public-facing: RFPs, MOUs, Board resolutions—documents anyone could already download from RIOC’s website.

And one email. Just one.

That email was between RIOC CFO Dhruvika Amin and Frank Farance, president of the Roosevelt Island Residents Association. No other internal emails. No board notes. No correspondence between staff and NYCT. Nothing.

The Appeal
We appealed. FOIL requires more than cherry-picked crumbs. At minimum, it requires an index of withheld records. It requires disclosure of factual summaries and final recommendations.

The appeal didn’t land inside RIOC. It was signed by Tracy Cole, FOIL Appeals Officer — who is not a RIOC employee but serves as Special Counsel in the Office of the Governor, with a cc to Shoshanah Bewlay, Director of the State Committee on Open Government. In other words, the State itself backed the decision to withhold.

They cited every tool in the book: attorney-client privilege, attorney work product, trade secrets, and the intra-agency exemption. And while they did attach a few very limited communications, they excluded any detailed breakdown of what was withheld—contrary to open meetings law directives. Even so, those scraps revealed enough to learn from. We will not pursue a lawsuit over this matter, but the record of obstruction remains.

Selective Disclosure as Narrative

Think about what they did release. Out of dozens of likely communications, the only internal record made public was an exchange that painted Dhruvika —the one RIOC officer who had advocated increasing public purpose funds—in a negative light. The rest vanished into the vault.

That isn’t transparency. That’s storytelling through selective disclosure. Legal’s job, it seems, wasn’t to inform the public. It was to shape the record, protecting some and targeting others. It begs the question: who is actually in charge? Were they trying to paint the CFO in a negative light while leaving out critical information and declining to provide even a communications director’s response? Maybe we are reading it incorrectly. We will leave it to you, the reader, to decide.

Why It’s Unacceptable

The Public Purpose Fund isn’t a private pot of philanthropy. It’s taxpayer money. Oversight documents are not “trade secrets.” And FOIL is not optional. A public authority cannot decide transparency means releasing only what fits a narrative while hiding the rest.

When communications stays silent, legal plays gatekeeper, and the board retreats behind closed doors, accountability becomes impossible. Roosevelt Island deserves better.

Where We Stand

We won’t publish the documents provided—they are partial, manipulated, and weaponized. We will not litigate at this time. But we will not stop documenting.

Because one thing is clear: when pressed for transparency, RIOC closes ranks. Sometimes, it even sacrifices one of its own.